The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday said it would continue to protest against Japan granting permission to two publishers to mark Taiwan as part of China’s territory in geography textbooks.
“We have yet to receive any response from Japan since we expressed concern over the matter last July,” Huang Ming-lung (黃明朗), secretary-general of the ministry’s Association of East Asian Relations, said in response to press inquiries.
GOVERNMENT STANCE
Despite Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology not having a designated textbook for its junior-high school students, the permission for the two private-sector publishers was an indication that the stance was supported by Japan’s government, Huang said.
Huang said Taiwanese representative to Japan John Feng (馮寄台) took up the issue with the Japanese government in July last year in Tokyo to register Taiwan’s protest and Japanese Representative to Taiwan Tadashi Imai was summoned by the ministry over the matter in April, but the ministry has not heard back.
The ministry will continue to negotiate with Japan over the issue, he said.
BEATEN FOR AUTISM
Meanwhile, in other news, Huang yesterday said the ministry has expressed concern to Japanese authorities over an incident in which a Taiwanese-Japanese schoolboy, who is autistic, was mistreated by a school teacher following an appeal filed by his Taiwanese mother on July 19.
The schoolboy, surnamed Kamiya, enrolled in sixth grade at an elementary school in Yamaguchi Prefecture in September last year after his parents moved to Japan from Greater Kaohsiung and entered junior high school in April, the ministry said.
According to the ministry, the mother complained to the school in May after she found out that her child was beaten in school, after which the school’s principal apologized to his mother, but the mistreatment continued.
After the ministry’s representative office in Fukuoka expressed concern over the case to officials overseeing the school, the principal promised to promptly resolve the problem, the ministry said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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